The Year’s Best - USA top Racket Sports nation in 2018

Another exciting sporting year is drawing to a close, and it is time for us to reveal the final rankings in GSN’s unique sport groups,

starting with those for which the year-end table is already definitive.

GSN tracks five different racket sports: Tennis, Racquetball, Badminton, Table Tennis and Squash. In 2018, only Squash didn’t stage a major international tournament, while all the other sports did, with Tennis as usual the main point-earner, being worth 71.6% of the points available in Racket Sports this year.

And the best country at Racket Sports in 2018 is … the USA, finally breaking an uninterrupted run of five consecutive wins by China.

In the course of this year, the USA won Tennis ahead of Germany and Spain, and came second behind Mexico in Racquetball, to clinch the top spot in the group’s aggregate table (see below). Curiously, US athletes did not win any of the tournaments tracked by GSN this year in either Tennis or Racquetball, but seven second places and a robust string of top-eight performances were enough to lead the USA to victory.

China had a successful year, winning the two other sports in the group, Badminton and Table Tennis, but this was only sufficient for fifth place overall.

Japan finished second in the group thanks to a balanced all-round performance, with second places in Badminton and Table Tennis, and seventh place in Tennis. Germany’s Tennis performances, with victories at Wimbledon’s women’s tournament (Angelique Kerber) and the men’s ATP Masters Finals (Alexander Zverev), plus a runner-up spot in the men’s Table Tennis World Championships, put the European nation on the podium for the first time.